Jocasta Takes a Trip to Lake Tahoe
Michael
Jo at Lake Tahoe: after a nearly 5 hour drive Jo gets out to Lake Tahoe a little before midnight. Now, not having had the ability to pre-surveil this area via map before coming out here and only having the most general idea of where Price's house is, Jocasta has to do a little driving around to find a good surveillance spot, but she does: a few hundred yards down the road from Price's lakeside property. It's a good-sized house—the main part of the house looks to be an old lodge from the '20s or '30s, plus there's a recently-constructed-looking add-on: looks like three small (bed?)rooms as an annex. When Jo pulls up, she sees a domestic sedan in the carport and a dim light on in what Jo assumes is the main living room (as well as a light on at the front door). Training the binocs on the house before Pat's arrival, Jo has a good view into the living room and can see anyone approaching this lakeside road from either direction; most likely Pat will be driving in from the highway. And lo and behold, he does, at around 12:30 am. He parks the car next to the sedan in the carport, goes to the trunk to grab a single piece of luggage (a medium-sized briefcase), fishes his keys out of his pocket and goes in the front door of the lodge. At 12:40 or so, Jo sees movement on the back porch overlooking the lake: the silhouette looks like Pat, and Jo sees the red-orange glow of a cigarette. He smokes it down quickly and heads back into the house, shutting off the living room light but leaving the porch light on.
Leonard
Okay, so, this is more or less Jocasta's game plan:
1. If there's no activity for an hour or so -- that is, nobody milling around, nobody comes or goes, the house gives the appearance of one where any residents are asleep -- she'll catch two hours of sleep, making sure to lock the vehicle.
2. She'll prep her gear. She'll be in full black bag mode, with plain black clothes, boots, gloves, a ski mask, and hair tucked in, nothing identifiable showing. She'll have her pistol with a suppressor, a camera, a basic tool kit, some evidence collection gear and a bag, cuffs, her NSA ID, and a notebook and pen. She will pointedly not have any drugs on her, but will be wearing her ballistic jacket.
3. If Price somehow manages to slip away while she's sleeping, she'll head in immediately. If not, she'll wait until he gets up, gets ready, and heads off to do some fishing, and then head in (unless it looks like there's someone else there -- did any of her research turn up if he's married or has kids?). She'll do a quick vibe check and if she gets any feeling of immediate danger she'll bug out but if not she'll start to turn the place.
4. Being as careful as she can not to leave any physical evidence, she'll enter the house and search it. She'll especially look out for any hidden rooms, false fronts, anything that looks like he's concealing something, but she'll also look for anything hidden 'in plain sight'. She will jimmy or kick in doors if needed -- she's willing to let Price know that someone has been there if it can't be avoided -- but she doesn't want to leave prints or anything like that. If anything interesting shows up, she'll make notes and take pictures; if anything incriminating shows up, she'll consider filching it.
5. Once that's done, she will very quickly find something that it seems likely that Price has handled very recently -- a pillowcase, a coffee cup, something like that. But she will not read it there! She'll head back to the car, leave town immediately, and then somewhere on the way back, she'll pull off to some secluded natural area, take a low dose of psychedelics, and do a psychometric scan of it. Then she'll lock the doors again, try to sleep, and give the drugs time to wear off before driving back. At some point, she'll also check in with the phone service, seeing if anything happened with Roger and giving him the lowdown on whatever she found (and anything interesting from the psychometry read, if it turns up anything.)
Michael
All good. Masterful move. Will move both Jo and Rog along later today sometime.
1. Yes, nobody comes or goes, no lights go on inside, right up until about 2 am things in the house are quiet.
2. Equipping done at 4 am. (This is after only two hours of sleep; are you popping a modafinil?)
3. Price emerges from the house at around 5, as the dawn chorus of birds out here in the woods unfolds. He's wearing fly-fishing togs: boots, flannels, and a lure-festooned hat. None of Jo's research said anything about spouse or kids or other relationships; surely that stuff would've been in his Burbank PD personnel file. But obviously Jo will need to give me a fresh Observation-14 roll. (Jo won't start losing FPs from lack of sleep until 4 this afternoon because of the couple of hours she caught.)
Leonard
Jocasta will play the Modafinil by ear. I don't think she'll need it because she has 2 points of Less Sleep, so if she's able to crash after searching the house and leaving town, she shouldn't lose anything (and she can recover FP quicker due to Fit), but if she starts to fade, she'll take one.
Michael
Yeah, Less Sleep is pretty handy if you just manage to catch a couple of hours of z's. Not being penalized until 4 pm is pretty nice.
Leonard
Made the Observation roll by 3.
Michael
Okay. As Jo approaches the house (let's say, 10 minutes after Pat drives off?) through the heavy pine forest, she keeps a keen eye on both the front door/carport area, the back porch, and the dock on the lake. It looks like Price doesn't own a boat but even now, a few minutes after official sunrise, Jo can see some early-morning lake fishermen out there, and she takes care to stay hidden from the lake side of the approach.
As Jo gets within a dozen or so feet of the clearing where Price's backyard area is, she sees movement inside the Price cottage. Through the living room window Jo sees a middle-aged woman with a mug of coffee in her hands. She's wearing a bathrobe, she has short but thick blonde-white hair, looks to be in her 50s, and she's heading for the back porch to have her morning joe. Stealth roll please.
Leonard
Oof, barely made it, by 1
Michael
Okay. Jo flattens herself against a particularly big-trunked ponderosa pine and thinks she has avoided being seen by the presumed Mrs. Price/Price girl friend. This feels more like a cop wife, Jo thinks, dutifully hanging out in the summer home while Pat does his top secret research in Menlo Park. I'll give you time to reformulate steps 3b through 5.
Leonard
Hmm. I'm a bit stymied. Cop wives are probably too canny to fall for obvious diversions, and regular housewives don't like to leave the house. I don't want to do anything drastic like physically menace the woman or start a fire, and over all this is the possibility that whatever I decide, Price has already seen or can see what's happening (which may be why she's there in the first place). Hmm hmm hmm. Is there an obvious or noticeable way to cut the power to the house from outside, like a junction box or an accessible cable? (edited)
Michael
There is! But it's in full view of both the road and of the living room windows. Now, "Mrs." Price is out on the back porch but if a car came up the road either way, they would see Jo monkeying with the junction box.
Leonard
Well, fuck. I'll sit around trying to finesse this all day and Price will get home and clobber me with a fish. Screw it: I'll sneak up as quietly as possible on the porch and try and get her with an ikoter. If that doesn't work, well, this won't be the first old woman I've beaten up. If it works, I can try to hypnotize her afterwards. If it doesn't, uh, well.
(Also Jocasta is very paranoid -- surprising, I know -- that Price already saw this happening and is laying a trap, but let's just try to forget about that at the moment.)
Michael
Okay. Let me break out the ikoter and aiming rules and we will get you a roll. One moment.
Leonard
First roll I'd like Jo to give me is a Tactics-14 roll. Picking the right angle of assault and targeting and so forth. I'll roll Stealth obviously but I want to see if Jocasta can position this just right to make the best shot possible.
Michael
After that, it'll be a Guns (Rifle) roll to shoot the ikoter beam weapon, minus 4 for Default penalty, plus a bonus for aiming (Acc 6), plus 1 for bracing, plus 2 for Aiming for more than 3 seconds: so Guns (Rifle)-20. Tactics may provide a bonus (or penalty), we'll see how the Tactics roll goes.
Leonard
Made the Tactics roll exactly.
Michael
Okay, Tactics spot on, so it's now a Rifle-21 roll.
Leonard
Made the Rifle shot by 13. That's something. (edited)
Michael
The invisible ray of linguistic white noise zaps Mrs. Price right between the eyes. She holds onto her coffee and just... zones out, staring out at Lake Tahoe. Jo checks her from a distance: she's good and dazed. And given the intense dose of ikoter linguistic static she got from that duly-aimed shot, she's likely in this state for, like, oh, 13 minutes. And obviously she is extremely susceptible to Hypnotism now too. (Jo also knows from past ikoter use that this means the presumed Mrs. Price is at least somewhat strong-willed; most likely a shot like that for most people would have meant unconsciousness and not simply being mentally stunned.)
Leonard
Glurgh
Well, 13 minutes isn't long enough to really turn the house, but the presence of a housemate kind of moots Jocasta's suspicions that Price has a basement full of corpses or something like that. Hypnosis won't make her think Jo's not there, so her time to turn the place is limited: she'll do a quick check through the full house, photographing every room to study later. She'll look for anything obviously strange or incriminating, and especially anything that gives her a weird vibe. Beyond that, she'll just have to cut her losses and run. She will go ahead with her plan to grab (with gloved hand) something that it looks like Price has handled very recently and do a read on it when she bugs out of town. When she's done, assuming nothing shocking happens (ha ha!), she'll try hypnotism on the hausfrau. Basically what she wants to communicate is: You nodded off over breakfast. It was a little embarrassing, but everything is fine; no need to tell Pat. He has seemed tense lately, though, and you should tell him to relax.
Michael
Give me a Hypnotism-13 roll!
Leonard
Made by 2.
Michael
10 minutes is truly not a lot of time. It's good thing the layout of the cottage is so easily sussed. The original 1920s lodge portion of the house has four rooms: kitchen, living room, bathroom, study. All are pretty small. The three bedrooms are also pretty tight: two are pretty clearly guest rooms and don't look slept in: the beds are made up tight and the stale floral scent of potpourri covering up mildew is evident. One is the Prices' bedroom and it seems decorated by the wife: more floral motifs and a definitely midcentury feminine decor touch. The study is the most interesting room of all of them, by far. It's a cop museum. A big 19th-century antique desk dominates the room, and all along the walls are photos and newspaper clippings and achievements and awards and shadowboxes with badges in them, all tracing Price's career in the police, in politics, and his many civic awards. On one wall are a bunch of taxidermied fish and a couple of deer heads. The desk has a typewriter and a phone and a few books: military history and true crime and mysteries, and there's a metal filing cabinet by the chair. Psychology-14 check please.
Leonard
Made by 8. Not quite a crit, but I'll take it under the circumstances.
Michael
Jo looks around the study. Here's the paradox as it appears to her haste-addled mind: any object that holds intense psychometric emotional traces is also going to be missed. Like, for instance, that Burbank PD badge: Jo swears she can feel the emotional resonance coming off it in waves from across the room... but if she leaves the premises with it, it's gonna be obviously missed. Jo doesn't know a ton about Pat personally but the profile tells her any of these objects that are in places of pride in here... they're gonna tell Jo something. Conversely, anything Pat doesn't have a close emotional connection with—his cup of coffee from this morning, the newspaper left on his desk—isn't gonna provide any emotional juice and thus would provide much less important and interesting information. So that's what the Psychology roll tells Jo.
Leonard
All right. Well, she didn't come all this way for nothing: Jocasta will grab the badge and pocket it. If her post-hypnotic suggestion takes, maybe this will fuck with Price's head enough to throw him off his game -- and, given the two-way mirror that was opened the last time she tried a psychometric read on something of his, this was probably bound to happen anyway. Once that's done, she'll do a quick look for anything else of interest, then go to work on the lady and get the hell out of town.
Michael
Okay. Badge under her arm, Jo goes out to the porch to have a chat with Mrs. Price. Jocasta stands out of sight of Mrs. Price behind her, and modulates her voice into a hypnotic cadence. "You nodded off after breakfast. It was a little embarrassing, but everything is fine; no need to tell Pat. He has seemed tense lately, though, and you should tell him to relax." Mrs. Price exhales, and she says back to Jocasta, robotically, "Yes. I waited up all night for Paddy to get back. He gets back and right away he's out the door fishing. Too tense. I should tell him to relax. Spend some time with me. No need to tell him I fell asleep over breakfast. It would just make him feel bad."
Leonard
"Very good. Rest a little more. It will be a quiet day today." With that, she's gonna bolt. In the van and out of town. She'll stop and check the service to see if anything went down with Roger, but she won't check in with any details until she gets back; just a quick "Safe and sound, debrief on Monday". Once she's at least an hour away, she'll find some turnoff, go deep in the woods, mediate in a focused way on what the badge has to say and what Price's greater role might be, and dose, doing a psychometric read on the badge someplace that is both unidentifiable in case Price can 'see' her and safe in case she gets a jolt of any kind. Then she'll toss in a lock box, sleep off the dose, and head home. That's the plan, anyway.
Michael
All right. Meditation-14 roll first!
Leonard
Made by 8 again. Always a crit's maid, never a crit.
Michael
And you are doing a mild dose as well beforehand?
Leonard
Eh, in for a penny, in for a pound. Full dose.
Michael
(I'm not gonna do all the GURPSmath for how long this trip will last like I did the other night for Jo. Let's just say it's going to last a while and open Jocasta up to using her Psychometry with more acuity and intensity.)
The badge itself contains all kinds of bad vibes as an object: a symbol of the System's authority, dripping in blood and abuse, all the vibrational energy of American Police as a concept... plus it's from Burbank. But Jo pushes through that. She doesn't care about this badge as a badge... what's important to Jocasta is what it means to Pat, specifically. And so she takes off her glove and lays her skin upon Pat's old badge number, 139. The extremely intense and strong wave of energy that overwhelms Jocasta is regret. Profound, heart-wrenching regret. A sadness, a pity, a gut-deep fear that I have done wrong, I have done wrong and it is my life's duty to correct this fact washes over Jocasta. Terrible, awful, self-recriminatory vibes. But Jo can feel the mutual, reciprocal connection just barely out of her grasp. She can feel, see, there is something that happened to Patrick Price about a dozen years ago that made him feel these things... but it's just barely out of reach. Of course, the acid that is coursing through her brain right now is activating that module in her cerebral cortex that the Anunnaki shaped in her ancestors five thousand years ago... and Jocasta knows she could push it. Use the Gifts of They Who Provide. Just this once. Just a little. (To get a full, critical hit level flashback to what caused this guilt and regret and self-recrimination in Pat and open up a two-way window into the past, Jocasta can spend 3 Corruption.)
Leonard
Let it be
Michael
Jocasta... lets go. And falls back to 1961. It's a gorgeous day in Studio City, Burbank. And a younger, somewhat fitter, Detective Pat Price is in a sloppy, weepy, drunken stupor. He's clutching the news story in his hand, accosting the bartender, asking him if he'd heard of the Rob Willis case. 10-year-old boy, abducted on his way home after Little League practice. The last victim of the so-called La Cienega Strangler.
"Yeah," the barman says rather warily, "I heard of it. They caught and shot the pervert, right?" "Yeah," Pat says. "But THIS BOY DIDN'T HAVE TO DIE!" He screams, the other mid-afternoon barflies obviously taken quite aback at this drunken cop's antics.
"I saw the killer's face! I saw him in my dreams! I knew he was a grip at Paramount, I knew he was killing the boys with microphone cord. I didn't ask how I knew all this shit, I was scared witless by the visions! The next victim would be a boy on his way home from a baseball game, in uniform. I could've had them stop all the leagues for a week, focused in on the murderer, found him. But I didn't. I thought they'd call me crazy." The barman stares at Pat's tear-soaked, whisky drenched face. "You saw him in dreams?"
"See. You don't believe me either. It's a fucking curse. My nana said the daughters in her family from County Clare had the Sight. I'm not a daughter. But I got it anyway. The visions won't stop." Pat picks up his whiskey glass and hurls it at the jukebox. The barman immediately gets out from behind the bar and goes to give Pat the bum's rush.
"I don't care if you're a cop, fella, you can't go around endangering my customers, go sleep it off in the park, you maniac." Pat's big, but the bartender is bigger. And Pat's heart isn't in resisting. The bartender tosses him out by ear and collar. Pat tumbles to the ground outside, knocks his head on a fire hydrant. And looks up and sees Jocasta, standing in a piney Tahoe glade. Pat looks around at the forest, not sure where he is. He looks at Jo again. "Sancta Maria, Mater Dei," and crosses himself.
(Jo knows from the file on Pat that his "Zen detective" schtick started in the early '60s. Post-'61 for sure.)
Leonard
Overcome with conflicting emotions, stunned by the precision and totality of the vision, body nearly shaking from the combination of the LSD and pressing the corruption button, Jocasta isn't sure what to do. "Someday you will want to stop hiding," she whispers. "You will see our true face when you show us yours."
Michael
Pat's eyes are jacked wide open. He stares into Jo's eyes; Jo can tell that the effects of the booze have washed away in Pat sharing the LSD trip across space and time with Jo. He reels, is stunned, staggers backwards and bangs his legs into the fire hydrant in 1961. "I can't bear to look! Who are you? How will I know to stop hiding! Why did the boy have to die?!" he screams and wails into a swirling vortex of twinkling ultraviolet lights in his field of altered vision that suffuse and obscure Jo from his gaze.
Bystanders in 1961 steer well clear of the crazy ranting rummy as he screams at the wall of the tavern he was just heave-ho'd from.
Jo can see a Burbank PD black and white making its way down the road towards Pat.
Leonard
Jocasta feels in over her head, but she can't drop the badge. Not yet. She feels a certain...obligation, like she opened a door and can't just slam it in someone's face because they walked through. "At the Institute," she whispers, "talk to the man with the cards. You can trust him with the truth."
With that, she looks toward the roller.
Michael
Younger Pat blinks, nonplussed, but comprehending, trying desperately to make sure he remembers this. As Pat's brother cops come up on him to get him to the station house and let him cool out and dry up, Jo's acid takes her back to the piney grove, staring up at the midday sun peeking through the needles of the ponderosas. Inside the sun's face is the face of a lion. It fades from vision and Jo shields her eyes. There are tears there.
Leonard
Jocasta will retreat wearily into the back of the van. She'll try to make a few sketches of what she saw, but the weight of the day is too much. She'll fall into a troubled sleep.
Michael
Still in awe of Jo's use of words in this bit, Leonard. Sounds so much like so many people's experiences with entities/spirits while tripping/in a shamanic state. I put the aliens, faeries, and cross in there as reacts for a reason.
Leonard
Hey, it’s all back to your being a good DM. I felt like this was going to be a relatively straightforward search and seize, and you threw me two curveballs in a row, but both of which were very natural to the story and the scenario. I may have screwed things up but I just did what I always try to do, which is stay true to the character. Jocasta may have not made the wisest move but I felt like it was the most Jocasta move. And now there’s a wrinkle that none of us anticipated, a new way of dealing with what might otherwise have been a whole different kind of NPC, and lots to build on. It wasn’t an easy scene by any reckoning but I loved it, so thanks again.
Michael
Oh, one other thing I was just thinking about: I think because Jo adhered to her "new" Sense of Duty Disad, I won't assess a Fright Check for the trip/psychometric contact with '61 Price. I was originally thinking I'd assess one at the end of the scene but I think given Jo's willingness to "go with the flow" of the experience, she is not finding it hard to cope with sanity-wise. Of course that could also be those 3 little points of Corruption talking...